“Exit, stage north!”

August is a really good time to get out of South Carolina and get an early taste of Autumn so I took a trip up to the mountains near Asheville North Carolina for a week of astrophotography and observing.

I had upgraded several key components of my setup since last year–the 16-inch Dobsonian had been replaced with an 18-inch Obsession Dobsonian, The 8-inch Astrograph scope had been replaced with a 10-inch version that is much easier to adjust the mirrors on, and the camera itself had been upgraded to a much larger sensor to image some of the large nebulas that are out there and actually cover a fairly large amount of sky.

I had also significantly upgraded my knowledge and procedures and probably the best $250 I spent this year was for a polar alignment camera called the “PoleMaster” by QHY. After all, everything I listed before is useless if your image is blurring all over the frame because you can’t track the sky correctly–damn spinning Earth!

Unstormy Monday

Monday was the first night and it promised to be a good one so I figured I would set up both a photography scope and the big Obsession which I could look at my “faint fuzzies” while the photo scope was taking exposures that would total a few hours worth.

I got there a full two hours before sundown because I knew this would be a long, complicated setup and wanted to make sure I was covered when it came to power; I was using batteries only since understandably there’s no 110v at the Mt. Pisgah Trailhead parking lot!

First thing I discovered was the strap that holds the 18-mirror in place on the big scope had worked its way loose on the trip up and the mirror was just sliding around on the mirror cell! Glad I discovered that before significantly tipping the assembly upright. A quick trip to the toolkit (glad I remembered it!) for a socket wrench and a pair of pliers and I had the mirror nicely snugged back into position.

There were two photos on my “gotta have it this trip” list: the North American Nebula in Cygnus, and my personal favorite object, the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant, also in Cygnus. I had two photographic scopes with me, a small wide field refractor and the 10-inch astrograph. Both the North American and Veil are big objects in the sky so the refractor was the instrument of choice for both and I was pleased to take the first serious photos with the new Triad nebular filter for astrophotography which was an $800 filter for the camera. It was supposed to be the bees knees and as it turns out, it is!

I got things aligned, checked out and running smoothly and had the computer take 240 15-second exposures of each object, for a total exposure time of 1 hour each. I wish I could have taken some longer exposures but after 2 years of fiddling I still don’t have automatic guiding working properly so this was the best way to assure that I wouldn’t come away empty handed.

While this was going on I was at the big scope observing all the great stuff in the summer Milky Way and all the things you can’t really see well without an inky black background sky. Four planets in the sky as well made for some fun observing where normally I’d be sitting in the chair in front of the photo computer playing Angry Birds!

About 4am I was toast and became incinerated toast as it took me almost 2 hours to pack everything back up and squeeze it into the car arriving back at my place in full daylight!

Here are the two images I got that night:

The North American Nebula (NGC7000) in Cygnus, just off the bright star Deneb.

The Veil Nebula (eastern portion); also known as the Network Nebula

Night Two, I Dew

My second night out this trip looked to be promising weather wise and I decided to just go with the photographic setup this time since after all it was my vacation and yesterday was freaking exhausting!

The plan tonight was to use the 10-inch scope and get a shot of the Dumbbell Nebula (M27) since it’s a large planetary nebula that would really fill a decent part of the frame and the new Triad filter would help a lot with contrast. So I got everything set up, polar aligned the mount with PoleMaster, centered my target, took a couple test exposures to verify that I wasn’t over-exposing the brighter things in the image. Then I told the computer to take another sequence of 240 15-second exposures while I settled in for the long haul in Angry Birds2!

You don’t actually see a finished looking image come up on the screen when you’re taking them; it’s only after stacking the hundreds of exposures on top of each other in the computer (after throwing away the bad ones of course) and playing around with it for a couple hours in photoshop do you actually see anything like the images above. So at the end of the run I pull up the last image and make an attempt to do some editing to make sure I’ve got what I think I got and something’s weird with the center of the image so I keep playing and eventually come to the conclusion that the image is unusable. So I look back 50 earlier in the shooting sequence, same thing! I eventually find out that all 240 images are toast and I’m suspecting that for the first time ever I’ve got dew on the camera lens.

Cool was not Cool

The way it works with these sensitive cameras is that in order to keep noise from stray electrons down they provide a thermo-electric cooling circuit that will cool the camera to 30°C below ambient temperature. Even though it was 70°F in the air the camera itself was below freezing and so I unscrew it from the back of the scope and see a nice little pile of dew drops from the warm moist air have condensed on the glass plate that protects the actual light sensor chip. Damn! Hour and a half wasted.

Now I have to clean it somehow without leaving streaks! So I get a few Q-Tips that I would normally use to clean eyepieces with and gradually absorb all the moisture to the point where I don’t see any residue. I think I’ve got it clean enough but there’s only so much you can see under a red flashlight so I decide that it’s the best I can do right then and head on to the next object.

Wild Ducks

In an attempt at “instant” gratification I decide to shoot a star cluster in the west since M27 was now in an area of the sky that was getting some low cloud action. Star clusters are a lot easier to process after the fact than nebulas I’ve discovered and I was determined not to come away from the entire evening empty handed. So I chose M11, the Wild Duck Cluster 6100 light-years away in constellation of Scutum, which is in the general direction of the center of our galaxy. It’s a cluster of about 2900 stars in a rich star field of the Milky Way.

I shot sixty 20-second exposures eventually being able to use 32 of them in the final image:

Messier 11, the Wild Duck Cluster, click to open a larger version of this image.

They call this the “Wild Duck” because the stars on the bottom sort of form the familiar V shape of ducks or geese flying in formation, It’s a stretch, I know but hey, I didn’t name it!!!

Clouds in my Coffee

By this time it was closing in on 3am and there were a lot more clouds in the sky, enough that no matter where I decided to shoot I was going get overrun so I decided to call it a night.

Wednesday the weather was bad enough that it wasn’t work making the trip out and setting up so I had a night Movie Night In at the AirBnb I was at.

I went out Thursday and set up the big scope for a night of pure observing bliss! I got clouded out after couple hours but not after some really spectacular high magnification views of Jupiter. Saturn and Mars, which was only a couple weeks past closest approach. It’ll be 2033 before we see it this good again!

The weather Friday was the worst all week so I decided to go home a day early so I could play golf all day Saturday instead of driving.

Bill the Sky Guy
August 2018